Katherine Leyton is a poet, screenwriter and non-fiction writer based in Toronto.
When I found out I was pregnant with my first child – and I mean that actual moment when I saw the two lines on the pregnancy test – I started shaking, and not with excitement. Even though it was a planned pregnancy, the actual confirmation that an embryo was present inside me was utterly destabilizing.
Discovering that my own body – one that belonged to me and only me for the past 33 years – was now being shared by a group of cells I hoped would become a human I would be responsible for was an experience I could never have prepared myself for. Excitement came in time, but at first, I was overwhelmed. I thought about what it meant to be divided in my own body, to see it functioning in a completely new and foreign way. Existential questions flooded my mind, but to my surprise, I realized I did not see these questions reflected in our public discourse surrounding pregnancy and motherhood. Why weren’t we all having public conversations about the philosophical implications of pregnancy (outside of the abortion debate, that is)? I mean, there was such rich content for discussion there, but it seemed like no one cared beyond belly bumps and morning sickness.
Was it true, I asked myself, as author Susan Maushart writes in The Mask of Motherhood, that pregnancy and childbirth are not discussed widely and seriously because men do not experience it themselves, and public discourse is just “a forum for what men know”?
Pregnancy progressed. I gave birth. I experienced early motherhood. Throughout the process, I had no script for how to discuss the terrifying and vulnerable elements of the experience, of which there were many. No books, movies or overheard conversations. The scripts I had were superficial; during pregnancy, people asked me about my morning sickness, about the sex of the baby, and told me how my body, in an aesthetic sense, would be ruined by it. Afterward, if they did ask me about anything related to mental health, it was sleep, and they’d offer empty platitudes about napping when the baby napped, just doing what I could, or keeping my chin up, all of which did not at all reflect the seriousness and consequences of the exhaustion I was feeling.
My first pregnancy was more than seven years ago, so my Instagram feed wasn’t awash, as it is now, in reels of happy, glossy pregnancy announcements and extravagant gender-reveal videos where pink smoke shoots out of little tubes or blue Smarties spill out of fancy cakes, but those same types of announcements – their tone – were pervasive in TV shows, magazines, and the social media of celebrities. In February, 2017, Beyoncé announced she and Jay-Z were expecting twins on her Instagram via a caption and a photo of her wearing lingerie, kneeling in front of an abundance of flowers, a veil draped over her head, visibly pregnant. The post got more than six million likes in less than eight hours. I’m not knocking Beyoncé’s announcement – it was a brilliant spectacle – just trying to get at how we view pregnancy, almost like a delicious commodity. With the explosion of TikTok and Instagram, that spectacle and commodification have only increased.
The way people spoke to me about my pregnancy, about early motherhood, felt so at odds with the things I was thinking about. I started thinking about death, for example, just hours after the pregnancy test. Already, I was so invested in this new life, so I was also thinking about its death. I wondered what it would mean to be a host to death, should I miscarry. Then I realized I would worry about the child’s death for the rest of my life. In her powerful, viral Paris Review essay, “Mothers as Makers of Death,” author Claudia Dey writes, “No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too.” And later: “The conversations I had with other new mothers stayed strictly within the bounds of the list: blankets, diapers, creams. Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: ‘I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You?’”
Why isn’t this psychological burden part of our conversations? Why isn’t it normal to ask about the toll it is taking on us not just physically (we’re asked about our aching feet, the tiredness), but psychologically? Why don’t we get some real, public recognition for the profound psychosocial risks inherent in this act?
Motherhood has been the most significant psychological and physical undertaking of my life. The act of growing a baby for nine months, enduring labour and extreme sleep deprivation (one right after the other), learning to breastfeed (or, if you choose not to or cannot, facing judgment for it), and adapting to the constant and profound fear and anxiety over the safety and well-being of this little person who means more to you than life itself is a huge shift, and yet there is no real public or social recognition of this.
In Renaissance Europe, when a woman found out she was pregnant with her first child, she would sit down to write a will. We are not living in the 15th century any more, when birth was incredibly perilous, but I find the idea of such a ritual – or one akin to it, one that acknowledges the seriousness of the undertaking – appealing, simply as a symbolic recognition of what we are about to take on when we conceive. I realize this may seem morbid, and I certainly don’t want to remove our joyful rituals surrounding motherhood, but I also want just one that acknowledges the reality of it.
In Canada, pregnancy and labour are incredibly safe (sadly, this is not the same in many countries worldwide, and Indigenous women in Canada face higher risk). Still, the risk is there. According to Statistics Canada, the maternal mortality rate in Canada in 2022 was 8.53 per 100,000 live births. There is also the risk of stillbirth, miscarriage, pre-eclampsia, excessive bleeding, vaginal tearing, postpartum depression, anxiety and mastitis, just to name a few of the myriad other minor and major pregnancy, labour and postpartum complications. Not to mention the very significant shift of now suddenly being responsible for the care of an extremely fragile, needy human being 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the identity shift and isolation that come along with it. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 42.3 per cent of women report having “a great deal of a problem” with one postpartum health issue in the first three months after giving birth.
I can’t dictate here how precisely our social scripts should change to recognize the realities of pregnancy and new motherhood, because I believe it needs to happen organically (though a good place to start might be a simple “How are you doing with this mentally?”). It will only happen organically if those realities are brought into the public consciousness, and I think this happens by making room for more stories about the psychological weight of becoming a mother. We need more books, TV shows and films about motherhood that aren’t fuzzy pink, silly or idealized (think Juno and Knocked Up). The film and publishing industries are beginning to open their doors to more serious contemplations of the issue, such as Rachel Cusk’s book A Life’s Work, Nefertiti Austin’s memoir Motherhood So White and Olga Ravn’s novel My Work, and films such as Pieces of a Woman and The Lost Daughter (itself based on a novel by Elena Ferrante). But honestly, most of the movies about pregnancy and early motherhood made in the past 20 years are ridiculous. Give it a Google.
A few years ago, when I was signing on with a literary agent to shop around my book about motherhood, Motherlike, I was told that it was still an uphill battle to sell one on the topic, as motherhood is still seen as niche. Niche? There’s never been anything less so – this is a process essential to our humanity, and how we treat mothers reflects us as a society – so let’s treat it as such. We should all be listening to the mothers in our lives who want to talk about the dark stuff; we should let them know we are here for that, not just the chats about sleep schedules and name choices. We should also be supporting diverse stories about motherhood, whether on TV or film, or in a theatre, book or on Instagram. For this Mother’s Day, that’s my wish for all the mamas out there.
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